Natural gas is at $2.79/MMBtu, down from a high of $3.21 a few weeks ago, but up from a low of $2.64 a few days ago.

Gas storage is 1,970 Bcf, a little higher than last year’s 1.844 BCF, and a little higher than the five-year average of 1,862.

Drilling rigs are 545, down from 553, but up from a low a few weeks ago of 543.

The Marcellus/Utica area produced more natural gas than any other area of the United States in 2025.

Shell says that global LNG demand will rise by 54% by 2040.

There’s more demand for oil from the U.S. because of the Iran War, but shale drilling is unlikely to provide a quick response. The Permian Basin is constrained by pipeline capacity (you can’t build pipelines in mere months) and other basins have about a five-month turnaround time. Also, none of the producers start drilling new wells when a temporary market disruption occurs, and the Iran war is likely to be temporary, at least when looked at from a driller’s perspective.

The Trump administration has waived the requirements of the Jones Act for sixty days. This should reduce the price of LNG shipments between U.S. ports.

Iran’s attacks on Qatar have destroyed 17% of that country’s liquid natural gas production for the next five years. That’s going to drive up demand for U.S. LNG.

With the war in Iran, oil prices are going up and are expected to stay up.

EQT thinks that by 2030, demand for gas from the Marcellus/Utica region will increase by 6-7 Bcf/d. The trouble for West Virginia is that we really need more pipelines heading out, or even better, additional value-added industry inside the State.

Natural gas prices are on the rise as well, and speculation is that fertilizer prices will rise, leading to a rise in food prices.

Here’s an article about H.B. 5381, which provides some substance to the West Virginia Governor’s 50 by 50 initiative.

Microsoft has signed a letter of intent to take 1.4 gigawatts of power from Nscale, the company building a power plant over in Mason County, WV.

I’ve labored under the delusion that America’s refineries couldn’t refine American crude oil because the refineries were designed to use a heavier crude oil than we produce. Turns out that’s not the case. Our refineries can use American crude, it’s just not as efficient, either in the refining process or the economics.

Oil prices are above $110/bbl.

Antero sued a local gas transmission company, Stonewall Gas Gathering, for $200 million and won a dollar.

OPEC+ has agreed to increase production by 206,000 barrels per day in May. This will not even come close to offsetting the 20 million barrels per day that flow through the Straits of Hormuz.

A ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has led to a quick drop in oil prices.

There is excellent news from Libya! Both ruling parties have come together to create a unified budget for the first time in over a decade. This could be the beginning of stability for the poor Libyan people, which would also lead to consistent oil production from the country.

MSN put together a good bullet point read of Antero’s Earning’s Call transcript.

Natural gas is at $3.09/MMBtu, up from a low of $2.83 about two weeks ago, but down from a high of $3.23 three days ago.

Gas storage is at 1,848 Bcf, above the 1,707 of last year, but very close to the five-year average of 1,865.

Drilling rigs are at 553, up slightly from 551 last month.

Mon Power and Potomac Edison have announced a new 1,200 megawatt natural gas power plant in Monongalia County, WV, near the existing Fort Martin power plant.

Antero Resources has agreed to settle with the U.S. DOJ and the WV DEP over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act and West Virginia Air Pollution Control regulations. The settlement requires Antero to pay a $3.8 million penalty, as well as make improvements to 242 of their sites in West Virginia and Ohio.

Looks like we’re going to start measuring power plants in gigawatts, now. There’s going to be a 9.2 gigawatt (9,200 megawatt) power plant built up in Ohio. Most of the gas that goes to that plant will be Marcellus/Utica gas.

The coal industry is ramping up to oppose natural gas plants in West Virginia. I know we have a lot of coal here, but we also have a lot of natural gas. We shouldn’t be shipping it out of the state without turning it into something more valuable first, and natural gas power plants are a great way of doing that.

The West Virginia oil and gas industry responded to the coal industry.

The free market is responding to the natural gas turbine shortage, as the free market does.

West Virginians are pushing back against the recent push to build data centers.

The father of the Marcellus shale play, Bill Zagorski, talks about what they did to make the Marcellus a good formation to drill and produce from, and what technologies and techniques could come into play in the future.

GO-WV published a fact sheet about West Virginia’s oil and gas production, including that WV is the fifth largest natural gas producing state in the nation, and that the industry supports about 73,000 jobs in the state.

A U.S. LNG producer, Caturus Energy, inked a deal between its subsidiary, Commonwealth LNG and a Saudi Arabian company, Mercuria Energy Trading, to sell 1 Mtpa (million tonnes per annum) of LNG to Saudi Arabia every year for the next 20 years. This marks significant changes in the energy and geopolitical world.

A company named Quantum Pleasants has finished a one-year trial of a technology that uses coal or natural gas to create hydrogen. The Pleasants Power Plant is located east of Parkersburg up the Ohio River.

The U.S. has carried out military strikes against Iran. This will disrupt the flow of oil, and drive its price up, of course, as Iran produces about 4.3 million barrels of oil per day.

Iranian drone strikes on Qatar have forced the closure of Qatar’s LNG exports.

Hope Gas is going to build a $250 million pipeline over in Mason County, WV. While that’s certainly not an enormous project, it’s also not small. This is the same pipeline that we mentioned in last month’s article, which is going to a data center over on the river.

Hope Gas’ Morgantown Connector pipeline just started flowing gas.

Technologies used for drilling oil and gas wells could be used for geothermal wells.

About ten days into the Iran war, and oil prices have jumped. They are expected to steady, and then probably drop back down as the uncertainties of war become known quantities.

Natural gas turbine makers are ramping up production capacity, albeit cautiously.

Saudi Arabia is cutting oil production as their ability to move oil through the Straight of Hormuz is hampered.

Natural gas is at $3.11/MMBtu, down from a high of $4.22/MMBtu.

Gas storage is at 2,214 Bcf, below last year’s 2,311 Bcf for the same time period, and also below the five-year average of 2,344 Bcf. The cold weather really drew down a lot of gas.

Drilling rigs are at 551, up from 543.

The ARCH2 Hydrogen Hub is less likely to be built now that there’s not a ton of money available from the federal government to fund it. That’s because there’s not a market for hydrogen.

West Virginia is in the PJM Interconnection, which is a regional transmission organization, or in other words, “part of our power grid”. The sudden increase in demand (mostly from AI data centers) and the lack of new power plants (WV has spiked quite a few power plant proposals in the past) has brought us to something of a crisis point. The President and 13 governors recently got together and told PJM what to do about it. PJM has its own ideas.

They’re building pipelines in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana–18 Bcf/day of new capacity! I’ll grant that it’s easier to build pipelines there, but we have a lot of gas that needs to be moved out of here. Somebody will build one here soon. I don’t make a lot of predictions, but I predict that we’ll hear rumors of a new one in or around West Virginia before the end of the year.

There’s a shortage of gas turbines for use in power plants. One suggestion is to repurpose old jet aircraft engines, as they are gas turbines.

The Moundsville power plant plans have been finalized, which means that Calpine is going to build it. We have a Governor who actually supports natural gas as a source of electric power generation this time, so it shouldn’t get terminated at the last second. The linked article includes some information about Governor Morrisey’s 50 by 50 plan as well.

The recent cold weather snap has led to “freeze offs”, which means that natural gas facilities are unable to move gas through their lines. This affects all natural gas equipment, from the smallest wells to the largest power plants. You can’t avoid physics.

It was only a matter of time. A pooling order has been remanded to the West Virginia Oil and Gas Commission because the Commission didn’t look at the evidence regarding whether an oil and gas company (in this case Arsenal Resources) negotiated in good faith with oil and gas owners.

As LNG exports have risen, geopolitics have begun to affect the market.

During the extreme cold snap, LNG exporters turned around and imported LNG. This was in part because of a law that says you can’t transport LNG from one port in the U.S. to another, as the article explains.

Fidelis has announced an enormous power generation facility in Mason County, WV. It will probably power up next year, and start with about 2GW of generation capacity. It could ramp up to between 8 and 10 GW, which is truly enormous. If it does get that big, it will be the biggest in the country. Incidentally, we just wrapped up negotiations for a client on a part of the pipeline that will lead to this facility.

Antero has completed the purchase of HG Energy.

The EIA has increased 2026’s Henry Hub price forecast by 25%, from $3.46 to $4.31.

The accepted theory is that oil and natural gas are by-products of ancient plant matter getting buried and then changing into hydrocarbons. There is another theory out there, the abiotic theory, which is that oil and natural gas are the products of heat and pressure at depth, and that they are being produced constantly. The old landman that trained me up believed this. I didn’t believe it at the time. Lo and behold, there is some evidence that it may be true.

Northeast Natural Energy is partnering with Evolution Well Services to use e-fracking on their well sites. E-fracking uses natural gas from the well or nearby wells to run generators that provide electricity to power the frack pumps.

Manufacturing industries that rely on natural gas are hurt when severe cold hits because they are the first to have their supply turned off. It’s a problem that could be offset by additional pipelines.

Natural gas is at $3.13/MMBtu after reaching a high of $4.69/MMBtu on December 29.

Drilling rigs are at 543, up one from last month.

Gas storage is at 3,185 Bcf, just above last year’s 3,152 Bcf and above the five-year average.

Wetzel Count lost a tax valuation case against a MarkWest pipeline. West Virginia code allows for a reduction in tax value for specialized property if it’s economically obsolete. The gas pipeline was being significantly underutilized, and so MarkWest argued that it was economically obsolete and appealed the value placed on it by the County. MarkWest won, and the County appealed twice and lost. I suspect that if the pipeline becomes fully utilized in the future that the County could place a higher value on the pipeline once again.

An EOG oil well in Carroll County, OH that was being fracked exploded and burned for about 15 minutes. It was probably a Marcellus Shale well, as the Marcellus produces more oil when you get more to the north and west of West Virginia. Thankfully no one was injured.

Hope Gas has installed its first WATT Fuel Cell in West Virginia, at the Edward M. Smith National Career and Life Skills Development Center in Clarksburg. Hope Gas intends to begin installing fuel cells in private homes in January 2026.

The oil and gas industry is starting to think more about increasing recovery rates from fracked wells. A typical well currently only recovers about 10% of the product that’s in the formation. Doubling that would double the amount of energy recovered from the well, and double people’s royalties. While this sounds good, I remember reading similar stories years ago.

The winds of change are blowing. Years ago, a natural gas fired power plant was proposed for a location just outside Moundsville, WV. It died, mainly because of West Virginia’s fixation on coal. It’s back now, mainly because of the demand for power that AI data centers are driving.

Antero’s President, Michael Kennedy, explained why Antero bought HG Energy.

Thirumalai Chemicals, a company that uses a natural gas liquid, n-Butane, as the feedstock for all of its products, is about to start operations at its facility outside Moundsville, West Virginia. The main reason this facility is here is because of easy access to natural gas.

A bill to speed up permitting for oil and gas infrastructure (called the SPEED bill), has passed the House. It’s going to see some changes in the Senate, along with some opposition.

In case you were wondering, here’s one reason why Venezuelan crude oil is of interest to the United States. Whether we should be doing what we’re doing in Venezuela is an entirely different question, of course, and our readers will have differing opinions on that.

Six people were working to plug an orphaned well in Ohio when it exploded, injuring all of them. Two of them died later.

In 2025, the U.S. became the first country to ever export 100 million metric tons of LNG.

Vickery Energy acquired Tribune Resources’ assets. We’ve seen some leases from Vickery, and they’re not good. They don’t pay much in the way of bonuses or royalty, and they don’t offer much in the way of changes to the language of the lease. This is probably their way of getting in the door to actual operations.

Antero is looking to get $750 million to help with the purchase of HG Energy by selling senior notes.

Natural gas is at $3.89/MMBtu, well below the recent high of $5.29 on December 5, 2025. In fact, we spent the entire last month well over the $4.00 mark. Predictions of warm weather are probably the cause of the lower price.

Drilling rigs are at 548, down from a high of 554, but of from a low of 544.

Gas storage was at 3,746 Bcf as of December 5, 2025. That’s ten days ago, so the number will be lower today, but the EIA hasn’t updated its storage report since then. That number shows increased withdrawals from storage, with storage levels below the five-year high but well above the five-year average. The recent cold weather probably reduced that number significantly.

India has signed a one-year deal to buy 2.2 million tons per annum of natural gas from the U.S.

The energy grid is getting a little concerned about data centers possibly not getting built after the grid spends a bunch of money on upgrades.

Shale 4.0 is a very recent term, but it’s good news for the U.S. and mineral and royalty owners. Shale 4.0 will be about maximizing the total recovery of oil and gas from the rock. We currently only recover about 10-15% of the natural gas or oil that’s in the rock.

The Freeport LNG plant shut down briefly, yet again. The article is worth reading as it explains how Freeport shutting down affects global prices.

The price of natural gas has been going up. Commodities traders like to read charts and look for patterns in them. Natural gas gets traded just like any other stock, so the thinking and opinions of traders will affect its price. What really drives natural gas prices, though, is weather. Regardless of breakouts, trends, and patterns on stock charts, natural gas will always react to the weather.

Charlie Burd of the Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia wrote an article explaining why West Virginia is uniquely situated to provide energy for the AI boom.

A couple of U.S. Congressmen have introduced a bill that would severely limit the ability of activists to slow down energy projects using the court system. While I agree that the court system is being abused in this way, this bill goes overboard, stating that if any lawsuit regarding an energy project has been ruled on, no other lawsuits can be brought against it. Technically, anyone could file any lawsuit against an energy project, lose, and no other lawsuit could be brought. I think you can see that this is also easily abused. Much of the bill is good, but it needs a little tweaking to be a good bill.

This is big news! Antero Resources is buying HG Energy! It’s not really going to make much of a difference for most people who have previously signed leases with HG. All of those agreements will stay in place and be unchanged. The main thing that’s going to change is that the name on the check stub will be Antero, not HG. It will be interesting to see if Antero continues to take leases in the HG areas or if the development resources that HG has will be shifted to other areas.

Probably related, INR and NOG are buying a bunch of Antero’s Ohio property.

The U.S. has set records for natural gas output and demand this year.

Natural gas prices are at $4.57/MMBtu, which is really high considering how much gas we have in storage (see below). I suspect that investors are expecting a hard winter and additional energy use from AI data centers.

Drilling rigs at 549, up just a little from last month.

Gas storage is at 3,946 Bcf, and is finally on its way down. However, it got up to the five-year high before it started coming down, which means that we have a lot of gas in storage. What I’ve seen in the way of weather forecasts suggest that we’ll have a pretty cold winter, though, so we may be very happy we have that much gas in storage before the end of the season.

West Virginia and Diversified have partnered up to plug abandoned wells.

EQT is selling a part of its ownership interest in some of its pipelines to an asset manager called Blackstone.

NextDecade has announced a positive FID for Train 5 at its Rio Grande LNG facility near Brownsville, TX. This is probably at least in part because of EQT’s commitment to purchase LNG from the facility.

If you’re the type that likes to dig into quarterly reports, here’s EQT’s 3Q25.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline is requesting the ability to pump 2.6 Bcf/day.

New turbines are out, old jet engines are in! Since there’s a dearth of new turbines, but AI really needs a lot of electricity, some companies are taking old jet engines (yes, from airliners) and hooking them up to generators.

The Trump Administration is taking advantage of low oil prices by buying 1 million barrels of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Weather predictions turned colder, so natural gas prices went up.

Expand Energy has acquired about 7,500 acres in Ohio and West Virginia, giving it another 40 “locations”, or 425,000 lateral feet, which makes “locations” sound like “wells”. They paid an average of $7,600 per acre. It’s not clear from the article whether those acres were new leases or acquisitions from other producers.

Here’s Antero’s 3Q25 Earnings Call over at Seeking Alpha. Someone did a summary.

Chevron’s CEO thinks that the U.S. has just scratched the surface of oil production, that new technologies will increase the amount of oil we can produce. If that’s true for oil, it’s true for natural gas, too.

Here’s CNX’s 3Q25 Earnings Call over at Seeking Alpha.

Here’s some news and analysis about production and pricing in the Appalachian Basin. The most interesting aspect of this to me was that producers are turning on and off production in relations to the price of gas. Didn’t used to be that way, at least not this much. The industry can match, to some extent, demand levels.

Here’s Diversified Energy’s 3Q25 Earnings Call over at their own website.

FirstEnergy held an event at the Harrison County coal plant where they talked about the 1,200 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant they intend to build.

U.S. natural gas production is expected to increase next year. In totally unrelated news, Europe’s demand for natural gas grew a lot this year.

McKinsey & Co. have analyzed building out new pipelines in the Marcellus-Utica region. Their report can be found here. Rumblings about pipelines are picking up. If I were a betting man, I’d bet there will be a new pipeline out of West Virginia announced next year.

Surya Oil and Gas, previously Cunningham Energy, has recommenced work in West Virginia, as per its 3Q25 report. The work is mainly road and site development.

The head of the EPA visited West Virginia to talk about energy and manufacturing.

Blackstone Energy has announced a FID for a gas-fired power plant in Harrison County, WV! At last, reason has prevailed!

Natural gas is at $3.02/MMBtu after hitting a low of $2.81 and then hitting a high of $3.50. It’s not great, but it’s not horrible. Cold weather forecasts would help a bit here.

Gas storage is at 3,721 Bcf, a little above last year’s 3.695 and even more above the five-year average of 3,567, though we’re sitting right between the five-year average and the five-year high.

Drilling rigs are at 547, significantly up from last month’s 539.

If you feel bad about the lease that you negotiated, just keep in mind that Lycoming County, PA negotiated for $4000/acre and a 2% royalty. That is not a typo. Two percent. Not twenty. Not twelve. Two. That’s after three years of negotiations and with representation by a law firm.

Ah-ha! The linked article explains why EQT is buying LNG. In short, EQT has agreed to provide a number of European buyers with LNG, and EQT isn’t going to just provide that from its own production.

The WV DEP classified the proposed Tucker County data center as a “synthetic minor source” of emissions. Environmental groups are saying it should be classified as a major source of emissions.

The drilling industry here in West Virginia is working to get some regulations repealed that impact its use of above-ground storage tanks. I personally haven’t delved deeply enough into this issue to have an opinion. I’m not a fan of regulations, but I am a fan of clean water, so whether these are useful, needed regulations is the question. It’s not an easy question to answer without more data than I have.

EQT wants to take back the title of top producer.

The Panama Canal is going to build a natural gas pipeline.

An ammonia plant that was proposed for Mingo County, WV, a while back won’t be built, but they’re thinking of building power plants for data centers instead.

Mon Power says they are exploring putting a 1,200 MW natural gas power plant in West Virginia.

The proposed natural gas power plants in Clarksburg and Morgantown will be great for the West Virginia economy.

Some of OPEC’s members agreed to increase production slightly. The price of oil actually went up, though, since it seems that traders had thought OPEC would boost output quite a lot.

Natural gas prices are at $3.04/MMBtu, up from last month’s $2.92, and up from a low during this last month of $2.70, but also down from a high during this last month of $3.12.

Gas storage is at 3,343 Bcf, just a little below last year’s 3,381 Bcf and still above the five-year average but below the five-year high.

Drilling rigs are at 539, the same as last month, but up from a low this month of 536.

Production is up in West Virginia, and the industry is looking forward to AI data centers being built as that will eventually add to our production numbers.

We’re about three-quarters of the way through the year, and the EIA is predicting that the country’s oil and gas production will set record highs.

An orphaned well (owned by a now defunct company or deceased person) that was being plugged exploded and injured all six of the crew members that were on site.

A full 30 percent of the energy the U.S. produces is sent to other countries.

Well, this is unusual. EQT is going to buy LNG from Sempra, from the Port Arthur LNG facility. Usually EQT is the one doing the selling. They must think they can sell it at a profit, which makes them an LNG trader as well as a natural gas producer.

West Virginia’s Governor has set a goal for the State to have 50 GW (currently 16GW) of power production by 2050. I’ll bet a large chunk of that gets taken up by data centers. I hope that a large chunk of that is natural gas plants.

August saw the U.S. set a record for the largest amount of LNG it has ever exported.

EQT is going to buy LNG from NextDecade, from the Rio Grande LNG plant. They’re really leaning into this LNG trader thing.

Shelley Moore Capito is still pushing for permitting reform.

EQT is going to buy LNG from Commonwealth, which hasn’t even gotten to the point of a Final Investment Decision (FID) on an LNG plant in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

Expand Energy’s CEO says that future natural gas prices are going to be more volatile. Buckle up.

International demand for natural gas is expected to increase through at least 2030.

Oil prices are likely to drop soon, as the Saudis are about to increase production and summer demand is about to go down.

Apparently Greece is connected to a pretty extensive natural gas pipeline network, and U.S. administrators are looking into the possibility of Greece being a natural gas hub of sorts. Who knew?

Trump administration officials said that the U.S. will double its LNG exports to the EU in the next five years.

Natural gas prices are at $2.92/MMBtu, a significant drop over the course of the month. The weather is expected to be mild, and gas storage is at a reasonable level, so of course prices are going to go down.

Drilling rigs are at 539, down from 544 last month.

Gas storage is at 3,186 Bcf, below last year’s 3,265 Bcf, but above the five-year average.

Homer City Redevelopment is building an enormous data center in Pennsylvania. It will be run by natural gas. EQT will be providing all of that gas to them.

A separate data center project by the Frontier Group of Companies will also be using EQT natural gas.

In order to capitalize on the data center craze, PA is looking at passing some laws to make it easier to build them. West Virginia has already done this.

A well that was being fracked up in PA leaked a bunch of frack water.

Ohio is studying whether to build a pipeline to carry natural gas from eastern Ohio to Lake Erie. It would supply counties along the route and a liquefaction plant on the lake. This wouldn’t directly benefit West Virginia, but I can see it taking some of the pressure off some existing pipelines, thus allowing additional West Virginia gas to supply existing pipelines. As this one would be entirely within the State of Ohio, it would not be subject to FERC regulation, thus making it harder for opposition to stop it.

If you’d like to, you can read EQT’s 2Q25 report and some analysis over at Seeking Alpha.

EQT plans to boost pressure in the Mountain Valley Pipeline so they can go from 2.0 Bcf of gas per day to 2.5 Bcf of gas per day.

West Virginia’s Attorney General wrote an op-ed in the New York Post deriding New York’s new law that makes oil and gas companies retroactively responsible for harming the environment.

Coterra Energy has been fined for allowing natural gas to migrate to water sources up in PA. Natural gas in your water is an annoyance, but not poisonous. It could explode if you leave the water running and ignite it. The more concerning thing would be if fracking fluid made its way to your water source. That stuff’s nasty. Always get a water sample before drilling begins.

The EU has agreed with the Trump Administration to buy $750 billion worth of energy (oil, LNG, and nuclear tech) from the U.S. over the next four years. That’s an enormous number, and I’m not sure how that’s going to happen. It should result in significant increases of exported LNG, though, even if the total number might be a little…aspirational.

Trump’s executive order declaring AI a national priority is going to make it easier to build massive data centers.

LNG exports will probably be driven primarily by gas from the Appalachian Basin. We’ll need some new pipelines out of West Virginia if we’re going to provide any more than we do today.

A bi-partisan bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that has the goal of speeding up the permitting process for energy projects. This would be a great benefit to West Virginia.

Back in the day, Cunningham Energy was drilling horizontal wells into old oil producing formations in central West Virginia. They have a new name, Surya Oil and Gas, they have a new technology for subsurface imaging (which I’ll bet uses AI), and they are beginning operations again in West Virginia.

You can find Antero’s 2Q25 quarterly report and some analysis over at Seeking Alpha.

Freeport LNG went down again, this time because power for the City of Freeport was out. No backup generators? Weird.

The Ohio River Valley Institute (which is anti-fracking) has published a study which shows that only one West Virginia county that produces Marcellus Shale gas has seen an increase in jobs–Monongalia County. That job growth was probably from WVU and the hospitals. The other counties have lost jobs. Interestingly, the GDP of all of the counties has gone up. I don’t think this study is much of a surprise to those of us who live here. A lot of the gas rights are owned by people who live out of state, the gas is almost entirely shipped out of state before it has any value added (turned into petrochemical feedstocks or electricity or sold to a utility), and historically West Virginia has been a state that exports its people. West Virginia really needs to add value to the gas before shipping it out of state. Manufacturing is a challenge here because of the lack of flat land, but we need to do something with the gas we have.

Shell is selling the cracker plant it built up in Monaco, PA.

Four Wetzel County families are suing EQT for releasing harmful pollutants that made their kids sick.

Natural gas prices are at $3.52/MMBtu, after hitting a high of $3.99 earlier this month, and a low of $3.21.

Gas storage is at 3,006 Bcfs, above the five-year average but below last year’s 3,190 for the same time period.

Drilling rigs are at 537, down from 555 last month, and still trending down.

Gas storage capacity went up in 2024. It had gone down significantly in the years before that, so having it go up is a very good thing.

The FERC has taken steps to remove some regulatory burdens that are slowing the construction of natural gas infrastructure.

Here’s an article explaining why we need more electricity (surprise, it’s for AI). And here’s one saying that we need to bring production of solar and wind components and parts back to the U.S.

Middle East energy companies are aggressively expanding into LNG.

The State Journal put together a pretty good article about the recent royalty cases decided by the West Virginia Supreme Court.

Diversified Energy keeps making moves. This time it’s a partnership with Carlyle, a financing company, worth $2 billion.

Lithium extraction from fracking wastewater has gone from theoretical to real in a very short period of time. Gradiant will open a lithium extraction plant in PA in early 2026.

Hope Gas and WATT Fuel Cells’ program to provide fuel cells to West Virginia homes just keeps getting bigger.

Chenier Energy has made the Final Investment Decision (FID) to build two more liquefaction trains at Corpus Christi.

All eyes have turned toward the Straight of Hormuz, at least, if those eyes are interested in the price of oil.

Commercial computing (AI) could be the largest single use of commercial electricity by 2050, passing cooling, lighting, and refrigeration.

Another company has announced successful testing of its lithium extraction process.

U. S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Morgantown and talked up natural gas and coal.

The FERC Chairman says we came awfully close to blackouts on the East Coast during the heat wave we experienced toward the end of June.

The amount of proved reserves went down in 2024. This is mainly because the calculation for proved reserves includes an economic element, so when the price of gas is down the amount of proved reserves will also go down.

The Energy Institute’s annual report shows that fossil fuels provide 87% of the world’s energy, and that fossil fuel use continues to rise.

The Texas Supreme Court came down with a decision that is likely to affect many other decisions regarding lithium ownership in the near future. They say that the waste water belongs to the producer (the drilling company that holds the lease, to be precise), so the surface owner doesn’t get a say in what gets done with it. Now, this didn’t deal with a separate mineral and surface ownership situation, and it didn’t get into trespass or conversion, and it doesn’t decide who owns the lithium. There may be other ways to look at this–those are just ones that immediately come to mind. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

EQT has completed the acquisition of Olympus.

Louisiana has done the opposite of some states, they’ve passed a law that prioritizes energy sources that are dispatchable, reliable, and American made. It’ll be interesting to see how that affects what they pay for energy in the near future, as well as how resilient their grid becomes.

Here’s some analysis of OPEC+’s decision to increase oil production.

Here’s an article about Diversified Energy. One interesting thing it points out is that Diversified produces more gas from West Virginia than any other state it operates in.

Energy imports have dropped to 17% of American energy.